"If I had my way we'd sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes."
— William S. Burroughs

"A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on. A psychotic is a guy who's just found out what's going on."
— William S. Burroughs

"Cheat your landlord if you can -- and must -- but do not try to shortchange the Muse."
— William S. Burroughs

"Ever see a hot shot hit, kid? I saw the Gimp catch one in Philly. We rigged his room with a one-way whorehouse mirror and charged a sawski to watch it. He never got the needle out of his arm. They don't if the shot is right. That's the way they find them, dropper full of clotted blood hanging out of a blue arm. The look in his eyes when it hit --- Kid, it was tasty.
"
— William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch: The Restored Text)

"THE EDGE, there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over"
— Hunter S. Thompson

"It never got weird enough for me."
— Hunter S. Thompson

"I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. "
— Hunter S. Thompson

"I feel the same way about disco as I do about herpes."
— Hunter S. Thompson

"Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous"
— Toni Morrison (Sula)

"Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all"
— Toni Morrison, Beloved

"All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. And then there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don't matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake."
— Jean Rhys

"The only time she felt excited or happy was when she had had a drink because then anything might happen. That feeling of insecurity became exciting."
— Lilian Pizzichini (The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys)

"...I know all about myself now, I know. You've told me so often. You haven't left me one rag of illusion to clothe myself in."
— Jean Rhys (Good Morning, Midnight)

"I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five)

"And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.
So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five)

"I'm not a drug salesman. I'm a writer."

"What makes you think a writer isn't a drug salesman?"
— Kurt Vonnegut (Cat's Cradle)

"There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smooths and contains the rocker. It's an inside kind--wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one's own feet going seem to come from a far-off place."
— Toni Morrison (Beloved)

"And talking about dark! You think dark is just one color, but it ain't. There're five or six kinds of black. Some silky, some woolly. Some just empty. Some like fingers. And it don't stay still, it moves and changes from one kind of black to another. Saying something is pitch black is like saying something is green. What kind of green? Green like my bottles? Green like a grasshopper? Green like a cucumber, lettuce, or green like the sky is just before it breaks loose to storm? Well, night black is the same way. May as well be a rainbow."
— Toni Morrison (Song of Solomon)

"True the Black woman did the housework, the drudgery; true, she reared the children, often alone, but she did all of that while occupying a place on the job market, a place her mate could not get or which his pride would not let him accept.And she had nothing to fall back on: not maleness, not whiteness, not ladyhood, not anything. And out of the profound desolation of her reality she may very well have invented herself."
— Toni Morrison

"Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee
And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me."
— Robert Frost

"My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed."
— Allen Ginsberg

"Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does."
— Allen Ginsberg

"I don't know, I don't care, and it doesn't make any difference."
— Jack Kerouac

"Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him."
— Vladimir Nabokov

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever."
— George Orwell (1984)

"Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood."
— George Orwell (1984)

"A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

Politics and the English Language, 1946"
— George Orwell

"Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one."
— George Orwell (1984)

"At 50, everyone has the face he deserves."
— George Orwell

"All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting."
— George Orwell

"On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time."
— George Orwell

"Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations."
— George Orwell

"'You're only a rebel from the waist downwards,' he told her."
— George Orwell (1984)

"So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane."
— John Green (Looking for Alaska)

"You can love someone so much...But you can never love people as much as you can miss them."
— John Green

"Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator. Don't stop to think, don't interrupt the scream, exhale, release life's rapture. Everything is blooming. Everything is flying. Everything is screaming, choking on its screams. Laughter. Running. Let-down hair. That is all there is to life. "
— Vladimir Nabokov

"…She was, obviously, one of those women whose polished words may reflect a book club or bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality, but never her soul. "
— Nabokov Vladimir. (Lolita. Mashenka. Zaschita Luzhina.)

"She was like Marat only with nobody to kill her."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

"There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction...For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

"Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons)

"Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five)

"Do you realize that all great literature is all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? Isn't it such a relief to have somebody say that?"
— Kurt Vonnegut (A Man Without a Country)

"There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five)

"There are plenty of good reasons for fighting...but no good reason to ever hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive....it's that part of an imbecile that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Mother Night)

"It provides the police with something to do, and as junkies and potheads are relatively easy to apprehend because they have to take so many chances to get hold of their drugs, a heroic police can make spectacular arrests, lawyers can do a brisk business, judges can make speeches, the big pedlars can make a fortune, the tabloids can sell millions of copies. John Citizen can sit back feeling exonerated and watch evil get its deserts. That's the junk scene, man. Everyone gets something out of it except the junkie. If he's lucky he can creep round the corner and get a fix. But it wasn't the junk that made him creep. "
— Alexander Trocchi (Cain's Book)

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
— Douglas Adams

"The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world."
— Leonard Cohen

"There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in."
— Leonard Cohen

"Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as a secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh."
— Leonard Cohen (The Favorite Game)